Papertrail

Russell Block

@russell

1536 Notes taken

91 Books

21 Notes taken in 2025

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russell's Recent Notes

London: The Biography

Mar 22, 2025

This discussion of the radicalism of Clerkenwell traffics through the Anabaptists. An excellent description of the Anabaptists, particularly in relation to the Bolsheviks, whose scion, Lenin, published a magazine from Clerkenwell, can be found in [The House of Government](https://papertrail.biblish.com/books/b9fa8215-c71e-4151-8912-4e2125b24384).

London: The Biography

Mar 17, 2025

The author’s wealth of references and the ease with which he integrates them into his narrative are impressive. They call to mind Picketty’s use of literary references in _Capital in the 21st Century_, although Ackroyd’s are considerably more florid.

The Rialto Books Review vol.025

Mar 10, 2025

# Man Made ## by @mariamullis

The Rialto Books Review vol.025

Mar 10, 2025

# The Elephants ## by Briana Wipf

Paris

Mar 2, 2025

One of the things that the book about Chicago taught me is that population is often a result of solving for the constraints on a growing population. At one time, in Chicago, it was sanitation, which was solved by reversing the flow of the river away from Lake Michigan. I wonder what contributed to London’s first overtaking of Paris.

Emerson: Poems

Feb 27, 2025

Another malady of my generation is the inability to do or endeavor toward a goal without some extrinsic and passingly authoritative validating mechanism. Millennials have no understanding of Emerson’s “What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so.” This was a contrived result, borne of a kind of decentralized and self-forming imperative, for it would have been particularly destabilizing for millennials to go out in the world with the intent to do, achieve, or come to a deep realization without education, most likely because millennial corporate, governmental, and cultural institutions were, by design, too rarefied and stingy with their allocations. We would have found that there was not enough meat on the bone and instead, willingly, perhaps, or subconsciously, decided to take “safe” paths in life that our parents, in actual fact or in the abstract, would not find abrasive or shameful. It also meant that those figures would not have to explain the state of society.

Emerson: Poems

Feb 27, 2025

In considering Emerson’s balance of nature, I find myself thinking that preoccupation is this age’s most relevant illustration of the hazard Emerson describes. Preoccupation ruins the mind. What are algorithms but the discovery of an individual’s several largest preoccupations braided into one rope? It is the rope by which we hang ourselves. In a society that specializes economically and which destroyed the spiritual imperative in the process of doing so, there is a great middle class of people without a self-evident and multivariate purpose who, unaware of the opportunity to perceive renewal and interest in every matter, fall prey to a preoccupation with a narrow set of concerns. Who would wish to be preoccupied?